The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740-1840 (review)

"Although we fancy our love of nature to be a modern development," writes Richard W. Judd in The Untilled Garden, "its origins lie in the myth-laced scientific tomes" written by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century naturalists such as John and William Bartram, Thomas Nuttall, John James Audubon, Benjamin Barton, Meriwether Lewis, Constantine Rafinesque, and a large number of lesser-known "explorer-scientists" whose work this book surveys (p. 8).

These scientists have been dismissed as mere taxonomists by other historians, Judd asserts, and left to literary biographers who have discussed them individually and without sufficient context. In the author's view they deserve more attention, and they require consideration together, because together they formulated and popularized what he characterizes as the essential ideas of the American conservation movement: protection of species useful to humans, romantic appreciation of natural beauty, and an understanding of ecological interdependencies. This argument complements that of Judd's 1997 Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England, which also seeks the roots of the conservation ideal several decades before John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

Judd divides the book into three parts. "Forging a Scientific Community" proposes a "transformation ... of a scattered collection of naturalist explorers, largely dependent on European patronage and European ideas, into a cohesive body of scholars and collectors with a common national identity." That identity, he asserts, was grounded in the "untilled" American landscape, which offered distinctive wild vistas and new discoveries. Part 2, "The Natural History of America," describes the explorers' understanding of the natural world, "from its geological underpinnings to the ends and purposes of each species of plant and animal." The third section, "Improvers, Romantics, and the Science of Conservation," discusses "how and why these ways of looking at nature changed" during the early nineteenth century, in response to ecological transformation as the western wilderness was settled (p. 13). Together, the parts provide a useful juxtaposition of science and romanticism in the explorers' writings, as well as the basis for Judd's contention about their contribution to an American conservation tradition.

Absorbingly written, with its clear thesis credibly argued, The Untilled Garden is based on Judd's prodigious research in the writings of his naturalist-explorers, both archival and published. It is full of quotations from them; nearly every page offers three or more footnotes to the primary sources, usually with multiple references in each footnote. Given the many naturalists he surveys, even the most critical readers will be impressed.

But academic readers will balk: those many footnotes contain few secondary sources, and most of the ones that do appear are not recent. This remarkable primary research is therefore not grounded in questions derived from or relating to the concerns of the many other scholars who have recently considered the history of natural history, and have found it tied to power and profit as much as to romantic science. In particular, Judd does not adequately address questions about the relationship between these scientific explorations and the economic motivations of their funders, about the relationship between his American naturalists and the traditions of European natural history that had been established during the previous two centuries, or about the imperial foundations of those traditions. In the absence of those concerns, The Untilled Garden describes these adventure-some, inquisitive people as remarkable intellects, without fully interrogating their views of the western wilderness or of the Native Americans who inhabited it.